A clerk pulls items for a customer order at the Amazon Prime warehouse, in New York on Dec. 20. Amazon announced last Thursday that it has narrowed down its potential site for a second headquarters in North America to 20 metropolitan areas, including Denver.

Days after Denver made the list of 20 finalists for Amazon’s new headquarters, Gov. John Hickenlooper tempered expectations about the bid, saying that if the tech giant picked another location, “I’m not going to cry.”

“There will be a sense of relief if they choose somewhere else, because there are a lot of challenges and lot of hard work we will be avoiding,” Hickenlooper told the City Club of Denver on Tuesday in response to a question about Amazon.

The Democrat is one of the state’s chief recruiters in the effort to bring the Seattle-based company’s $5 billion second home to the Denver area, and he acknowledged the sentiment is a controversial one, particularly as other locations gush about the potential investment. “Nobody tweet that,” he quipped after his remarks.

Hickenlooper said the state is “legitimately and sincerely” pursuing the company, and he later clarified in an interview that he believes the positives outweigh the negatives. “I wouldn’t pursue it if I didn’t think it’s the right thing,” he said.

The challenge, the governor argued, is the potential for growth in the already-crowded Denver area with the addition of up to 50,000 employees — who would make an average of $100,000 a year — that Amazon is promising. The governor said he believes Amazon “would be willing to be our partner” in dealing with that issue, but his remarks hinted at the impending ordeal the winning locale would face to accommodate the company’s demands.

Sam Bailey, who led the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. in working with the state to submit the official bid, said he was not surprised by the governor’s comments — and doesn’t believe it will hurt the bid.

“More than anything, it reflects our tone that has been there from the start. We are cautiously optimistic on this Amazon opportunity. I think the governor is looking at it as, if we lost Amazon, it’s not the end of the world for Colorado. We have a ton of opportunities like the one we announced this afternoon,” he said referring to the announcement the same day that Strava, a social fitness company, will open an 89-person office in Denver.

“Ultimately, I think if Amazon didn’t respect our approach of cautious optimism … they would have crossed us off their list,” Bailey added.

Colorado submitted a single bid that offered at least eight sites in the Denver area that met Amazon’s criteria. And the governor added Tuesday that it includes “three to four really good sites” to fit a growing company. The state offered potential financial incentives that could exceed $100 million to lure the project.

The remarks are not the first time Hickenlooper tried to downplay the state’s odds. In October, he called the bid a “longshot” effort, in large part because of Colorado’s distance from the Eastern time zone.

Earlier in the speech, Hickenlooper, the former Denver mayor, appeared to caution the members of the civic organization not to speak too quickly against additional business development and growth, as he sensed “we are not far away from the tide of public opinion turning.”

If city leaders decide Denver has grown too much, he said, “we should be very thoughtful because once you make that decision — however you state it, telling the Olympics to go away or whatever — it’s very, very hard to take that kind of a sentiment back and say, ‘Oh, we were just kidding.’ ”

It’s a conversation that Denver’s economic development community is exploring, too. Bailey said the Amazon bid is “a reflection point.”

“I don’t think of it as a sigh of ‘relief,’ ” he said, referring to Hickenlooper’s statement, “but it is a point to think about: What is our strategy as a community? How do we grow and define ourselves?”

Benjamin Stapleton's notorious role as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, while serving five terms as mayor of the Mile High City in the first half of the 20th century, lurks just below the surface of this year's race for governor and presents pitfalls for the both Stapleton and his Democratic opponent, Jared Polis.

Bank of the West's decision to divest from certain fossil fuel investments has run headlong into threats of retaliation in Colorado, Wyoming and other states that rely heavily on coal, oil and natural gas extraction for revenues.